A History of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has seen a dramatic rise over the last 20 years, powering the growth of some of the biggest global companies. Each year saw numerous changes, acquisitions and innovations. This blog attempts to document the key events. If I have missed a key milestone, please comment below and I will add and evolve this blog over time.

1994

Yahoo is established. Yahoo originally was a directory of other web sites as opposed to a searchable index of pages. By the end of 1994 Yahoo! had already received one million hits.

Lycos went public with a catalogue of 54,000 documents. Ranked first on Netscape’s list of search engines by finding the most hits on the word “surf”

Infoseek is established

AltaVista delivers the Internet’s first Web Index

1995

Yahoo was incorporated

Infoseek is launched – who originally hoped to charge for searching.

The MSN network of Internet services debuts in the United States.

Lycos had identified 394,000 documents

Netscape decides on Infoseek for their default search, which gave Infoseek major exposure.

Open Text Launched

Megallan is launched

Excite is launched

LookSmart is founded

The term “Search engine optimisation” is added to the dictionary

1996

Yahoo raise $33.8 million dollars by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each

Ask Jeeves founded by David Warthen. The new search engine was to allow searcher to type questions in natural language in order to get results. The Jeeves character, based on the butler in the Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse

Lycos claim to index over 60 million documents – more than any other web search engine.